“The storm started in the back of the house, not the front.” Hazel asserted the point for the hundredth time. She flopped down and reclined in a non-reclining plastic chair on the porch; an unlit cigarette dangled between the fore and middle fingers of her right hand and a Styrofoam cup of WhitePort swung in the other. Zeke grinned widely, exposing his chipped front teeth. “You are drunk, Hazel. That storm you’re talkin’ about was your momma…

First Witness, Dr. Gartis Dent: with the Foundation For the Harmony of Magical Creatures.

(1)

I must say, as dragons go, Zor'L is probably the most unpleasant of them all. Throughout my observations, his teeth were almost always bared and he could be found regularly set into the most bewilderingly disagreeable moods. I am…

Mr. Kitchens spent the better part of an hour, in the applications line, staring at a mole on the neck of the woman in front of him; so it was all he could do to remain calm enough to completed the darn thing. He really needed a break, so he tucked the standard sawed-off pencil into his shirt, then neatly folded the application and slipped it into his pants pocket before going to find a restroom. On his way out, Mr. Kitchens…

He stood across from me, one brow lifted and staring straight into my eyes. He startled me at first, an apparition it seemed, about my height appearing on the bus that day. Days turned into weeks and it wasn't enough to be the only one seeing him; I wanted others to see him. I hunched them when he appeared at the company picnic or on my dates. There is a certain confidence about him too; a strut is what it is, that suggests he owns me, and everything around me. He…

He was sitting at the 22ndstreet bus stop when lightning struck him, full on, in the middle of the chest. His heart didn’t stop immediately; it sputtered first, stalled, and then eventually faded out. It was just as well, he thought, as his final moments ticked away. His Taurus had done the same thing just last week and he’d been in quite a state over it. A hazy vision of that car wafted across the back of his eyelids as he lay there contented, his fate sealed.…